Weekly Overview

Well, we've continued to make great progress over the last week or so. A third person camera has been implemented, a lot of scripting has been learned, and a prototype of a second level piece has been published. With this in mind, let's take a closer look.

Art

We have yet to get our first character model finished, they take a lot of work! However, we have some nice texture concepts to show off.

This first one is for a cave drawing the ants have made within their tunnels.

And now, our first look at the outside world in our final concept stage!

As you might surmise, we're going in a fantasy direction with the outside world. We've already suspended reality by having ants that shoots guns which real ants never do, as far as us humble humans know, and so decided to carry a bit of that feeling into the look of the world. Also, if you think about it, the real world might look incredibly boring from an ant's point of view. We would end up with large green grass pieces everywhere and you might not be able to discern what a given object is supposed to be. Could you identify a tire if you saw it from a very small perspective?

Gameplay and AI

Both of these areas have made good progress this week. The AI has run into a bit of a wall with a possible set of bugs in the release we're using. More research will be done to see if we will have to update our version of UDK. Over in gameplay, a lot of scripting work has been done to thoroughly understand what is possible. A lot more details about gameplay progress can be found in this week's gameplay post.

Level Design

As I mentioned before, a prototype of the next section of the first level has been created. It is much larger than the first piece, which consisted of only three rooms. This piece has many more, and is much more diverse in terms of possible directions for the player to take, hiding locations, and has multiple floors. Unfortunately, it is currently untextured making it rather hard to look at. We'll have more pictures for you next week. In running through the level, I discovered a rather amusing bug. It seems that the geometry of the level is not quite aligned with the grid, meaning the current AI cannot successfully pathfind. The ultimate result of this is that the AI continually suicides, making for a rather large pile of bodies.

Just for kicks, I added a second bot. The result was somewhat predictable.

Obviously, we'll get this fixed for next week. Oh well, just goes to show that no one gets it quite right the first time.